ned with an averted eye?
Him do thou pity,--him above the rest,
Him, of all hapless mortals most unblessed.

That needs no commentary, and it contains a large truth in small space.
Here is a little bit on the subject of the artist's ambition, which is
also good.

The thousand painful steps at last are trod,
At last the temple's difficult door we win,
But perfect on his pedestal, the God
Freezes us hopeless when we enter in.

The higher that the artist climbs by effort, the nearer his approach to
the loftier truth, the more he understands how little his very best can
achieve. It is the greatest artist, he who veritably enters the presence
of God--that most feels his own weakness; the perception of beauty that
other men can not see, terrifies him, freezes him motionless, as the poet
says.

Out of all of Watson's epigrams I believe these are the best. The rest
with the possible exception of those on the subject of love seem to me
altogether failures. Emerson and various American poets also attempted the
quatrain--but Emerson's verse is nearly always bad, even when his thought
is sublime. One example of Emerson will suffice.

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake.

The form is atrociously bad; but the reflection is grand--it is another
way of expressing the beautiful old Greek thought that "God _geometrizes_
everywhere"--that is, that all motion is in geometrical lines, and full of
beauty. You can pick hundreds of fine things in very short verse out of
Emerson, but the verse is nearly always shapeless; the composition of the
man invariably makes us think of diamonds in the rough, jewels uncut. So
far as form goes a much better master of quatrain is the American poet
Aldrich, who wrote the following little thing, entitled "Popularity."

Such kings of shreds have wooed and won her,
Such crafty knaves her laurel owned,
It has become almost an honour
Not to be crowned.

This is good verse. The reference to "a king of shreds and patches"--that
is, a beggar king--you will recognize as Shakespearean. But although this
pretty verse has in it more philosophy than satire, it approaches the
satiric class of epigrams. Neither America nor England has been able to do
very much in the sort of verse that we have been talking about. Now this
is a very remarkable thing,--because a